Seventy or Seventy-Five: A Number That Moved

The number of Jacob's household who go down to Egypt is given in this portion as seventy (Genesis 46:27), a figure the Masoretic Text repeats at the start of Exodus and that later became foundational to rabbinic reckonings of Israel's origins as a small, complete household of seventy souls. The ancient Greek Septuagint and a Dead Sea Scroll fragment of Genesis instead give the number as seventy-five, a variant also reflected in the New Testament's Acts 7:14, a small but genuine textual divergence between manuscript traditions that text critics attribute to a different reckoning of Joseph's own descendants rather than to simple copying error.

Source critics generally treat the Joseph narrative, including this portion's climactic recognition scene, as substantially unified material rather than easily separable into strands, while noting Priestly-style genealogical lists, including the count of seventy, layered into the story at points such as this one. Traditional Jewish commentary treats the number seventy as symbolically significant well beyond mere headcount, later associated with the seventy nations of the world in rabbinic literature and with the seventy elders of Israel, so that a household migrating to Egypt is read as already prefiguring a people meant for the whole world.